City schools may face 3 audits over attendance records

Thursday

Jun 28, 2012 at 12:01 AMJun 28, 2012 at 12:36 PM

The Ohio Department of Education told Columbus City Schools it has two weeks to turn over records and communication concerning district administrators changing student attendance records. The department will hire an independent auditor to look into allegations that district officials manipulated attendance to improve the state report card. The state auditor's office said yesterday it, too, would launch its own probe, meaning up to three auditing teams - including the district's internal auditors - could investigate the charges.

Bill Bush, The Columbus Dispatch

The Ohio Department of Education told Columbus City Schools it has two weeks to turn over records and communication concerning district administrators changing student attendance records.

The department will hire an independent auditor to look into allegations that district officials manipulated attendance to improve the state report card. The state auditor’s office said yesterday it, too, would launch its own probe, meaning up to three auditing teams — including the district’s internal auditors — could investigate the charges.

“ODE will continue to expect that you and your staff, including your internal auditor, will be readily available to provide any necessary information or access to permit this special audit to occur,” Stan W. Heffner, state superintendent of public instruction, wrote Superintendent Gene Harris in a letter dated Monday.

Harris said the district would cooperate fully.

The letter had been sent to the wrong email address on Monday and Harris did not receive it until yesterday, after The Dispatch asked about it.

Invoking a state statute that gives the education department the power to audit state report-card data when it “has reason to believe the district has not made a good-faith effort” to report required data, Heffner informed Harris that the district could be billed for the probe if it finds Columbus schools officials tampered with records.

Harris said that she asked the education department for help delivering this year’s report-card data. However, Heffner said he doesn’t have the manpower to assist the district, which has until July?20 to submit its report-card data.

Heffner asked Harris to deliver records by July?11 of policies that show how and why district officials are authorized to enroll, remove and re-enroll students and policies for the recording of students’ daily attendance. He also asked for all written correspondence from those in the district responsible for making or carrying out rules for reporting student attendance.

The state auditor will also conduct an investigation, Carrie Bartunek, spokeswoman for Auditor Dave Yost, said yesterday. Yost’s office is “putting together a specialized team of accountants, lawyers and investigators” to conduct the review, she said. The agencies might team up to avoid duplication, said Patrick Gallaway, spokesman for the education department.

District Internal Auditor Carolyn Smith said yesterday she had not been notified by either state entity of the new probes, and didn’t know whether her investigation would continue.

The Dispatch has reported that a group of former and current district employees say that large numbers of student-attendance records were routinely changed — sometimes retroactively at the end of each school year — in a bid to improve the state report cards.

Students with large numbers of absences would be removed from the district’s rolls, as if they moved away, and then simultaneously re-enrolled, with the effect of erasing large strings of absences, the officials charge.

Other absences were simply deleted. Some of the changes were made by a group of data analysts in the district data processing center, a group of retired data analysts said. Others were made by principals and school secretaries.

Some changes were made in October, when the district takes a head count of students to receive per-pupil state financial aid, some officials charged. That could have inflated the district’s state aid, they said.

In a letter to Heffner on June?15, Harris said that district staff had “identified inconsistencies in student attendance records related to student truancy filings with Franklin County Juvenile Court,” and an internal review was focused on whether the changes “were documented and appropriate.”

“Recently, the internal auditor informed me that she believes the issue appears to be of greater concern and scope than previously thought,” Harris said in the letter.

Deliberately fudging state report-card records can have serious consequences. The same state law that makes possible the ODE independent audit also empowers the State Board of Education to:

• Suspend or revoke the license of any school district employee found to have altered data.